Tag Archives: The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl

Are you going to Jaipur? Well, we are, and we hope you're coming along too. And if you do find yourself there, don't forget to look out for our Zubaan authors. They won't always be by the bar or schmoozing with fellow literati, but they'll be around, in conversation with other authors and in panel discussions. How do you recognise them? Well, here's our little guide to Zubaan @ the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Day 1

January 20, 2012

5.15-6.15pm:

'Prison Diaries'

Anjum Zamarud Habib will be in conversation with Iftikhar Gilani, Sahil Maqbool on a panel moderated by Siddharth Vardarajan.

Day 3

January 22, 2012

3.45-4.45pm

'Amaar Bangla'

Zubaan author Anita Agnihotri will be in conversation with Malashri Lal along with Radha Chakravarthy and Fakrul Alam.

Supported by Ministry of External Affairs (SAARC Division)

Day 5

January 24, 2012

12.30-1.30pm

'Women Writing Conflict'

Zubaan authors Anita Agnihotri and Mitra Phukan will be on a panel along with Devi Rajab, moderated by Urvashi Butalia.

3.45-4.45pm

'The Good Girls Come to Jaipur: Last Words from Lovely Ladies'

Annie Zaidi, author of Zubaan's The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl will be in conversation with Qaisra Shahraz, Manisha Kulshreshta and Samit Basu on a panel moderated by Nisha Susan.

A little bit about our authors:

Anita Agnihotri

Anita Agnihotri is a bureaucrat and administrator. She has worked extensively with tribal communities who provide the content for her moving and poetic writing. She has authored over 30 books that include novels, collections, and short stories, and it is this last genre that is the closest to her heart. Her collections of stories include Forest Interludes, which has been translated into Swedish, and Seventeen, published by Zubaan.

Anjum Zamarud Habib

Anjum Zamarud Habib is the founder of Muslim Khawateen Markaz which was established in 1990 to work for the welfare of women. A year after her release from prison, she founded the Association for the Families of Kashmiri Prisoners and is currently conducting a survey on Kashmiri prisoners in jails in India and their families.

Annie Zaidi

Annie Zaidi is the author of Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, and the co-author of The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl, Or The Good Indian to Living, Loving, and Having Fun.

Mitra Phukan

Mitra Phukan is a writer, translator, columnist, ethnomusicologist and classical vocalist. Her published literary works include four children’s books, a biography, and a novel,The Collector’s Wife. Her most recent work is another novel, A Monsoon of Music. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. Her works have been translated into several languages.

We're extremely delighted to find three of our titles featured in Namita Gokhale's list of Best titles of 2011. For Zubaan, this comes close on the heels of Venus Flytrap, Zubaan's anthology of women's erotica, being listed in at least five publications as one of the significant books to look forward to in 2012. Clearly we're doing something right. However, it isn't complete until you read the precious titles that we put out on the shelves. These are the three books in Namita Gokhale's list.

A Terrible Matriarchy By Easterine Iralu

It’s the coming of age story of a Naga childhood, situated in both internal and social strife. Documenting a society in transition, it evokes the spirits of time and place, of births and deaths and passings. Iralu’s writing has the quality of pared down simplicity, with an aftertaste of hurt and irony. “For some days after Vimenuo’s father’s death, people could speak of nothing else. There were stories of people who saw him on their way back from the fields in the late evening. They said he appeared to them near the stream on the way home, his face turned away from them. But of course they knew it was him immediately; he wore the checked flannel shirt that was his favourite when he was alive.”

The Bad Boys Guide to the Good Indian GirlBy Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra

Aka the Good Indian Girl’s Guide to Living, Loving and Having Fun, this delightful book actually covers much more serious territory than the unsuspecting reader might first deduce. The “Good Indian Girl” is the subject of much Bharatiya and diasporic angst. Dedicated to “All Indian Girls: Good, bad, ugly, little, perfect, plump, married, dead”, this tour de force goes through the complex territory of sex, virginity and sacrifices in the name of family, culture and nation. As the authors elucidate, “You can access a kind of default nationalism through the simple process of not having any fun...”

The book has been effectively translated by Manisha Chaudhury from the original Hindi. The shadows of violence loom over Ailan Gali, a street in Kashmir where the houses are stacked against each other in shoulder rubbing intimacy. These multiple tales of memory and transition, of migration, modernity and exile hold together a novel which invokes the sounds and smells of a place the Pandit community once called home.

A Street in Srinagar has also been shortlisted for the DSC Prize to be announced at the Jaipur Literature Festival!

Is she funny, annoying, sharp, quiet, bold, what? Say something interesting about good Indian girls in the comments section below this review (link provided) and win a free copy of The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl or The Good Indian Girl's Guide to Living, Loving and Having Fun.http://www.womensweb.in/articles/good-indian-girl-book-review/

"According to the authors of The Bad Boys’ Guide To The Good Indian Girl, Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra, the Good Indian Girl, or the GIG, is a ‘condition’ and the word ‘good’ isn’t the opposite of bad. The good Indian girl is one who has managed to find a way around social restrictions by pretending to conform and doing what it takes to survive. Zaidi and Ravindra identify certain situations and analyse them through illustrative stories that, as they point out in their preface, are not quite fiction. “About 80% is fact. Most stories are drawn from our own experiences, or that of our schoolmates or college friends, or friends of friends,” Zaidi said in a recent interview."

Another review by a reader, though her take on the title is not quite how it happened :). Here is what she has to say about the book.

"If I were asked to name this book, I would have called it “Splendid Stories of Good Indian Girls, Which Can Be Enjoyed By All.” And man, what classy stories they are. Some of them are not more than two pages long and some run to ten pages or more. Each of them is about an Indian girl, mostly good, a few bad and many who are not so good, but manage to get away with it. Zaidi and Ravindra write in excellent unobtrusive prose which is akin to high quality corn flour used in good chicken soup. You don’t really get to taste the corn flour and don’t even think of it much as you gulp down the soup, but without the quality corn flour, the soup wouldn’t be half as enjoyable. Another very good thing about the prose is that though jointly written, it is seamless. If the joint authorship hadn’t been proclaimed on the cover, I would have thought the entire collection was written by a single very good writer."

Most of us (in India) cannot or won’t express our feeling too openly, because we live in fear of being rejected, of being judged, of being branded as social outcast. We are kind and compassionate, even to those who hurt us, we pretend to forget and forgive, we keep a smile and move on, and we lead a double-faced life.

My friend posts a FB status that says “I'M A HANDFUL - unfortunately most women WON'T re-post this. I'm strong willed, independent, a bit outspoken, and I tell it like it is. I make mistakes, I am sometimes out of control and at times hard to handle but I love and give with all my heart. If you can't handle me at my worst then you sure don't deserve me at my best. If you are a HANDFUL, re-post! I dare you..I'll be looking for the ladies who re-post”

I asked her “Are you a good Indian girl?’ and she replies “not a chance..not even trying.” And I am set thinking if the above status makes you very un-Indian?

Nina Paley’s wonderfully visualized movie “Sita Sings the Blues” brings home the deep rooted bias most women have against Sita. “Sita Sings” is a beautiful movie. The illustrations are stunning, and the music! Oh the music is to die for. And yet, the movie, like most other medias, undersells Sita. It depicts Sita as a lovelorn, naïve, clingy person who cannot stand up for herself and revels in the injustices Ram heaps on her. Ram is the jerk, Sita the feminine pushover.

The movie frustrated me (for those interested, you can watch the entire movie on youtube and the quality is excellent) because I expected more understanding from an artist of Paley’s caliber. I have always thought of Sita as a staunch feminist, one who has been misinterpreted and misrepresented for so many generations we can no longer see her for the independent woman she was.

From what is popularly known about Sita, Sita is learned, rich, physically strong – she could lift the shiva-dhanush with her left hand, beloved of her parents – yes, this too is important, too many women find independence difficult because their parents did not love them as much as they loved their sons. She marries a valiant and powerful prince, one who must prove his worth before he can be wedded to her, and she is loyal and loving towards the man she marries. When her husband leaves for the forest she follows him as an equal, capable of handling the challenges her husband would face during exile. Through it all, she remains a trusting person. She trusts her husband, she trusts the forest around her, harsh as it might have been, she trusts the vows of marriage and the bonds of love. She trusts, and she is betrayed. She is abducted by Ravana and held captive, but the abduction is not a betrayal, it is an incident that takes place and during the period of captivity she continues to trust Ram and probably interprets the abduction as one of the many challenges she and her partner were facing together. Upon rescue, she does not demand an agni pariksha of Ram. We know that during Sita’s absence Ram was pursued by other women, Supranakha for one, but Sita does not doubt or question Ram’s fidelity. She does not wonder what Ram had been up to while she was away. She does not ask him to prove his purity. What she does instead is prove her own.

I see Sita enter the fires of the agni pariksha as a different person, and emerge from it differently, and I see Ram’s demand for the agni pariksha as the strongest betrayal she faces.

Everything after the agni pariksha is shoddy and ugly. Sita is more and more alone in the world thereafter. After the washerman incident, Ram asks her to leave the palace. Laxman takes Sita to the jungles and does not return to look into her affairs again. The supremely loyal and faithful Hanuman is no longer in the picture. She is by herself, at the mercy of the elements and the strangers she meets there, and she is pregnant. When she goes into her exile her partner does not follow. Her challenges are hers alone, and she deals with them masterfully. She never returns to the palace again. She gives birth to twins and raises the boys single handedly, doing such an excellent job as a single mother that her sons become capable of winning wars and ruling kingdoms. It’s marvelous to think of all she must have had within her, her skills, her knowledge, her self-esteem, her fierceness, all the things concerning her that are never talked about.
When Ram, harrowed by guilt, loneliness, and a sense of injustice asks Sita to forgive and to return, Sita is not willing to forget. She will not return to Ram. She would rather die, and Sita’s final act is terrifying in its dignity. I wonder sometimes what she must have done, how she killed herself. It seems like she threw herself into a gorge, or off a cliff, into mother-earth. But perhaps, she walked back into the thick forest and never emerged. Perhaps she simply said no. Perhaps she said to her sons, choose, and they chose and she left. She is one of those proud people who are heart wrenching in their solitude.

I love her deeply, but I don’t want to worship her. Not because she is not worth the worship but because the centuries have distorted her image so savagely, made her so weak, simplified her to an equation that always adds up to Ram. The centuries have used Sita to weaken women in general and provide license to men. Sita and Ram are the first couples to have gotten a divorce and it is because Sita did not grovel to return to her marriage that we have hammered her down so systematically. What a contrast Sita is to Sati, who dies too, but to protect her husband’s honor. Sati is hailed as a woman of immense courage and love, one who made such an impact women were forced to burn on their husband’s pyre. Then there is Sita, who dies to protect her own, but we don’t discuss that, do we?

Our brilliant and very exciting title, The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl, by Smriti Ravindra and Annie Zaidi has been getting some splendid reviews. This doesn't happen too often with our titles, most publications are biased and believe our titles are too niche, a false accusation, you'll realise when you go through our catalogues.

But its true, The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl, is a one-of-a-kind title. It's revolutionary because our fantastic authors have managed to fictionalise or rather contextualise non-fiction accounts by men and women they've interviewed and to put across their narratives in quirky, subversive ways.

If you haven't yet read the book, and you need a little nudge, do check out these reviews. If you have read the book and have your own opinion about it, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to send in a comment, we'll be happy to feature it on the blog.

Right from the book's onset, the authors claim that every generation has had their share of GIGs (Good Indian Girls, abbreviated throughout the book). While the story called Buzz is a fun take on the literal 'buzz' that is created, when a girl asks her male classmate the way to the toilet in his house at a party -- Panty Lines outlines the relationship a girl shares with her panties, including the association of shame and forbidden desires attached to it. Boobs, is an astute observation about how peers can make one feel worthless and ashamed about one's body.

The writing style is colloquial and therefore easy to identify with. The narratives could be from anywhere in India, though Annie is keen that readers not adopt a closed approach to their origins. "I resent blinkered phrases like 'stories from small-town India' or 'Gen Next'. I have met conservative women even in Mumbai. For instance, as a cub reporter, I was once scolded by a woman for asking men, instead of women, for directions when I was lost."

Paromita Vohra, the edgy writer and documentary film-maker reviewed the book for Tehelka in a piece called The Nervy Ones

The book’s memoir-like writing is gleaming filigree, delicately detailing the tiny shifts of implication girls gauge to see how far they can go, how much more they can want — unlike the Schneider and Fein type girl, their wanting is huge. It lays out the web of reputation, violence and confusion, the extreme fear of being alone that leads to lives of both depression and defeat as well as chance-taking, effrontery, bold fun lies and canny manipulations. These stories, with few morals, absorb you, make you laugh, and quiet you — especially those of the Singh sisters, who call boys from a landline hidden in the cupboard and who end up marrying exactly the boys they want, through deft moves, whereby the defeated patriarch PP Singh doesn’t even know he’s been bested.

Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra’s book The Bad Boy’s Guide to Good Indian Girl tells me that this is one of the qualities of a GIG (good Indian girl) and who is the Bad Indian Girl (BIG). They dissect this and many other facets of being a GIG and unearth the complexities of living in a society that is modern and traditional at the same time. This complex phenomenon unfolds through stories of many women, interwoven, laying bare the hard work that goes into being a GIG. It is funny. It is enlightening. It is non-judgmental. And it is upsetting in many, many ways.

And finally (at least for the moment), the review in The Hindu who covered the launch of the book in Bangalore. Read "And the Good Girl Is" for more. Meanwhile, an excerpt:

The book has been co-authored by Annie and Smriti Ravindra and the whole book is an attempt to locate this creature known popularly as the ‘good Indian girl' says Zaidi, “The book is an attempt to figure it out – we talked to women in the sub-continent and wrote stories on their stories and it culminated in this book.

If you can't take our word for it, you can go by the reviews, and with the click of a button and for just Rs 207 (Rs 88 discount), you can own your very own copy of The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl through Flipkart.

A few days ago, Zubaan had run a twitter contest, inviting tweets with the hashtag 'goodindiangirl'. Funny, quirky, honest, random. There were dozens of responses and the ones that appealed most to us won free copies of the book and t-shirts. There were others that we liked just as much, but could not agree on. Here is a list of tweets. The ones we can still find on our TLs anyway.

If there are more you know of, or something you'd like to add to the list, go ahead and do it. The comments space beckons.

Aneela Z Babar: Would a #goodindiangirl be tweeting from the bathroom?Hiding from her toddler? No? Than probably I'm stuck being a #BadPakistaniWoman

About
Zubaan is an independent feminist publishing house based in New Delhi. We publish academic books, fiction, memoirs and popular nonfiction, as well as books for children and young adults under our Young Zubaan imprint, aiming always to be pioneering, cutting-edge, progressive and inclusive. Find out more.

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